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    The Idea To Have An Idea…

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    Whistles.

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    Intentional Brands.

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    Brand Strategy

    Taglines Gone Wild.

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    Steve Poppe
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    The tagline is a very misunderstood communications and branding device.  A tagline should be the de facto brand claim.  Beside the product itself, it is the single most important thing consumers should remember about your offering.  While a brand strategy is actually one claim and three proof planks, the claim element is the one indelible thought or value that motivates preference, consumption and repeat consumption.  I would say loyalty, but one can be loyal and not consume.

    Many marketers go wrong when they confuse branding with advertising. This happens when the advertising campaign line or tagline drives branding. KFC’s “Finger Lickin’ Good” is a great example an advertising tagline that brilliantly reflects the brand claim. “That’s My Mission,” the tagline for Mission Health, is way too ad driven — and not even close to a meaningful, powerful brand claim.

    Unless your tagline can reflect a coherent, endemic brand value, you are wasting branding dollars. And ad dollars.

    Brand strategy first then advertising. Not the other way around.

    Peace.

     

     

    Branding Is Multiplex.

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    Steve Poppe
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    Brand strategy is all about immersion in your product or service. Identifying problems and clarifying opportunities. You can spend scores of hours listening to consumers talk about your product and watching them use it. You can talk to the sellers of the product, the makers of the product, and the engineers. After many hours you begin to see patterns and reoccurrences of values. It helps form your plan. The plan to position your product.

    Don’t forget, though, that your brand isn’t an island. It operates in a competitive arena. And there are people loving, liking, using and recommending competitors. It’s not good enough to look at the competition’s website and come to conclusions about its value. You need to do immersion there as well.  You need to pry into the psyches of consumers you want to win over. You need to see how tightly consumers embrace your competitors. They have a job to do and they, presumably, are working hard every day to defend their share.

    So, it’s not just about finding the optimal spot to position your product, it’s also about examining consumer predilections for your competitors. Branding is not binary, it’s a multiplex.

    Peace.

     

     

    Brand Strategy Misnomer.

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    Steve Poppe
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    If I ask a marketing person their ad strategy is, likely answers would be “Increase sales.” Or “increase customer base.” Maybe “generate customer activation.” And were I to ask that marketer to articulate their brand strategy, they’d probably also default to generic functional answers.  Say things like “maintain our graphic standards,” or “design signage, packaging and graphics to clearly convey a unified message.” Possibly “maintain a consistent voice in the marketplace.” When, actually, the question “What is your brand strategy” is not a structural question at all. It’s meant to elicit the idea or value that propels the brand to success – a business-winning claim in the minds of consumers.

    If I ask your name, you’d say Joann or Edward, not “It’s the descriptor people use to identify me.”  But many people either don’t think of a brand strategy as their specific claim for building business — or they just don’t have one.  In the latter case they probably rely on their ad campaigns for brand strategy.

    Either way marketers are not reaping the rewards of brand strategy. It’s a crying shame.

    Peace.

    PS. The definition of brand strategy, here at What’s The Idea? is an organizing principle for product, experience and messaging.

     

     

    Cultural Strategy.

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    Steve Poppe
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    I was listening to the Fergus O’Carroll’s On Strategy podcast with Harvard professor Douglas Holt yesterday and heard some cool insights on brand planning. Mr. Holt has this thing he calls Cultural Strategy which as a student of anthropology interested me quite a bit. Brand planners have to be cultural anthropologists, as they try to nestle their selling schema into current culture — with an eye toward creating future culture. (An academic would blast me for the last part of that statement. Culture is organic, not man-made, they would caution.)

    (Pictured here, Franz Boas, father of cultural anthropolgy.)

    One of Douglas’s thoughts is worth dissecting: “Whoever is the symbol of the dominant ideology in the category, controls the category.” (Clearly a challenger mentality, evidenced by his follow-on point that you need to disrupt the category leader who can outspend and out-media all challengers.) 

    Two differing examples, the first supports Holt’s Cultural Strategy notion: when Oatly plays its save-the-planet card in oat milk messaging, that’s not an endemic product quality sell, it’s a culture sell. When I used the word “nestle” above, my point was one needs to nestle an endemic product value into the cultural lever — not use the cultural lever as your main value. With my client Handcraft, maker of the Potty Genius Potty training kit, we didn’t position around reducing disposable diapers in landfill, a cultural lever. We led with the “joys” inherent in the accomplishment.  The landfill claim was a support, albeit a very good one.  

    Douglas Holt is certainly onto something. Most planners agree culture (and category culture) are robust insight mines.  But don’t pray tell forget what is popping off the production line. Product always needs to be at the heart of any claim or proof plank.

    Peace.

     

     

     

     

    Positivity in Brand Strategy.

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    Steve Poppe
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    Neil Young’s new album has a rather apocalyptic track called Human Race. Many of today’s social commentators seem obsessed with negative goings on. Climate. Politics. Covid.  The list rolls on. There are, indeed, lots of reasons to be negative. I get it. My friend Donald hasn’t tweeted a nice thing about American politics in years. The evening news is 92% bad stuff, one puff piece.

    There’s a miasma of negativity surrounding us. It’s deafening. Yet life goes on. We try to be healthy, tell jokes to lighten the moment, and search for light.

    One place positivity is quite important is branding. (Didn’t see that one coming, did you?) Planners should always be looking for the light. For the promise of goodness, success and perhaps a touch of elation. That’s how I run my brand strategy practice. Lot’s of planners look to solve problems. I get that too.  It’s easy lifting. Many marketers looking to branding solutions are trying to fix things. But positivity is my jam and I like to think it makes for the best brand planning.

    Find a positive brand objective. Seek out a positive consumer motivation. Bathe your discovery in warmth, consumer pride and satisfaction. We have lots of time to be solemn. Our job it to position brands around hope and positivity. Not the meh.

    Peace.

     

     

    Can Brand Strategy Enculturation Cause Disruption?

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    Steve Poppe
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    A not so new marketing buzz word is Disruption.  It’s been around the advertising business for decades and thought-leader Charlene Li has made quite a business out of it.  I’ve been thinking about the word and my business, brand strategy, and wondering if brand strategy can actually be a disruptor. My answer is a big fat “yes.”  Brand strategy, as “an organizing principle for product, experience and messaging” has the ability to govern the decision-making of employees and cohorts. 

    When decision-making is in lockstep within a company, consumer attitudes cannot be far behind. And consumer behavior quickly thereafter.  Early in my career I leaned the fastest way to change consumer attitudes was through TV advertising. Smack TV watchers in the face with a message and demonstration enough times and they tend to believe. But advertising has been so watered down and the web has collapsed many of the steps-to-a-sale so as to make advertising way less powerful.

    Brand strategy however, brought forth through all channels and contact points can disrupt business as usual. But it must be tight. Compelling. And category-meaningful.  When products and services live the life of the brand strategy, and don’t just talk about it, change can happen. And fairly quickly. That’s disruptive.

    Enculturating your brand strategy is the ideal. First within the brand company, then within the buying public.

    Peace.

     

    Brand Strategy is Business Strategy Requited.

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    Steve Poppe
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    “Decision making filter” are words Ana Andjelic uses to describe brand. I wonder if we are kin from another mother.  When I read her newsletter post “Why VCs should pay attention to brands,” I felt a special kinship. My descriptor for brand strategy is “An organizing principle for product, experience and messaging.” And if you boil down my words or ladder them down, it yields decision-making filter. Take action based upon a strategy.

    When we use words the brand rather than business, business people get uncomfortable.  They think we’re talking brand ephemera: logo, color palette, tagline, voice, and such. HELL NO. We are talking strategy. Strategy that is bi-directional. Or full duplex. That means we are not just leveling a strategy at consumers, but we are bringing consumers into the strategy, so they can play it back to us. So they believe they are the participants and propagators of the mission.

    Business strategy is one way. Brand strategy is two-way. Love can be unrequited, but it’s not fulsome love. Brand strategy is business strategy requited.

    Why Ana’s post is important is VCs tend to stop at business strategy – at financial viability and ferocious growth.  Branding is about completing the circle. Creating a fertile, long-term garden. One that fertilizes itself.

    Peace.

     

     

    The Creative Brief.

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    Steve Poppe
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    Words are important. Especially to creative people.

    Creative directors, art directors and copywriters all have their own way of making decisions about what constitutes good creative. Certainly, the output is mission critical. But good creative know the ability to motivate action and preference among consumers is most critical. And that means action beyond liking the ad.

    One of the key stimuli for a creative team is the brief: the document that sets the stage and strategy for the execution. There are a couple of different type of words used in a brief: science words and sales words.  “Science” words are the what and the why – the evidence of the product and claim. “Sales” are the word flourishes that are supposed to excite the creative team into creating great ads.  The problem is, creative people don’t want to read briefs that are salesy.  Exposition that is anything more than a valid claim, specs, advantages and competitive superiority are bullshit to them.  Creative people know this because they are in the bullshit business. They see it and smell if before anyone.

    Tell a creative person your widget is more reliable and they seize up. Tell them it has a gold-plated framis that last 10 times longer and they can get to work.  

    This is why creatives prefer shorter briefs. It’s easier for them to remove the sell from the science.

    Peace.

     

     

    Voice. Tone. Personality.

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    Steve Poppe
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    This may be sacrilege in the brand planning community but I’m not a big fan of tone, voice and brand personality.  I believe those are words born of ad agencies not true brand strategists. Tone isn’t a strategy.

    Tone and voice are the domain of the creative agency. Of the campaign.  That’s not to say those things aren’t important, they certainly are. Tactically.  So long as they advance the brand strategy: “an organizing principle for product, experience and messaging.”

    Brand strategy defies what is business-winning in the market pursuit. Creativity in delivering that strategy is what agencies do. Making the claim and proofs original. Interesting. Captivating. And those pursuits may require a change in tone and voice from time to time.

    George W. Bush once used a phrase I loved talking about cowboy wannabes. “All hat and no cattle.” My brand planner take on that when disparaging a marketing campaign would be “all voice no strategy.”

    Peace be upon you.

     

     

    Brand Solutions.

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    Steve Poppe
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    Brand strategists and brand planners make a living uncovering problems. Sales problems, targeting problems, product problems. I could go on and on. In my brand planning rigor, I delve into customer care-abouts and brand good-ats.  When customers care about something your brand is not good at, you’ve got work to do. That’s a problem. Pretending is not a good brand strategy. So you can see why many brand planners circle the problem.

    But I like to think of care-abouts and good-ats as positive qualities.

    Unabashedly a contrarian, I don’t spend my days looking for problems but for solutions.  How does one plot success for a brand without looking for hindrances? Weaknesses? Negatives?  Well, by looking toward the light.

    Twenty years ago when baseball god Mike Piazza emerged from the NY Mets dugout with blond hair, he gave men everywhere permission to color their hair.  Did L’Oreal or other hair care companies use that moment to double the hair coloring market? Nope. An opportunity missed. A solution, sans a problem.

    Attempt to be a solution seeker not a problem solver. It’s harder work, but more rewarding.

    Peace.  

     

     

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